Saturday, May 11, 2013

The following is a book review that I did for the History Teachers Association of Australia in 2011. It was derived from an article I did for Quadrant magazine after hearing Augustine explain his thesis at a private history study group - Turks Head Club - in Melbourne. It supported concepts from my 1991 MA that had been too politically incorrect to publish at the time. This article was followed by more detailed articles on the concept that I published in Quadrant, and in the Canadian 'Dorchester Review'. It received a good deal of comment on American blogs at the time.

I have decided to give this brief version a run here because I suspect that one of my regular commentators is a victim of the myth... you know who you are...

The myth of a Great Betrayal by Britain during World War II has taken
root in Australia, not just amongst parochial scholars, but also in the general
population. Fortunately, an American scholar has produced a book (which
includes excellent and readable selections for students), that demolishes the naive
excuses and selective use of sources characterizing what he calls Australia’s
‘national myth’.

Augustine Meaher (IV)’s detailed analysis shows Australian interwar
governments based their entire defence strategy on the fantasy that a naval
base at Singapore (which they would not fund) could support a fleet (which they
would not fund), so that Australia could pretty much ignore the need for any
local defence. They pretended this regardless of many warnings from the British
government and Admiralty that, even if a fleet were available, it might not
arrive in time to prevent - at least - raids on Australian territory.

Meaher makes clear that Australia’s defence was not a matter of
‘somebody else’s problem’:

Australian governments ignored the Imperial defence
requirement that the nation provide for its own local defence. Properly
understood, Imperial defence would have allowed Australia to weather the
turmoil of early 1942 much better.

As a result, when Churchill sensibly suggested evacuating Singapore well
before the surrender, Curtin called the idea an ‘inexcusable betrayal’. The
British 18th division was then sacrificed as a forlorn hope, and joined the Australian 8th and two
Indian divisions in captivity. Who really ‘betrayed’ those troops?

Throughout 1942 British reinforcements for the Middle East, including
armoured divisions, were designated for diversion to Australia if invasion really threatened. Britain
also delivered the promised ‘main fleet to the Far East within six months’. By
April 1942 the British Eastern Fleet of five battleships and three aircraft
carriers was the biggest Allied fleet anywhere in the world (even without the
other four battleships and two aircraft carriers en route). This assembly
required the Royal Navy’s effective abandonment of the Mediterranean for
several months (contributing to Rommel’s last advance to El Alamein). The
British were hardly shirking on their promises.

The crux of Meaher’s argument is that Australian had small and poorly
educated elites – social, political, military and industrial – who failed to
understand Australian and Imperial defence needs. The result was what British General
Montgomery-Massingberd described in 1935 as “a national characteristic of self
complacency”.

Meaher sees the expediency of these political elites as the real betrayal.
Whereas Australia had compulsory national service, and a powerful and expanding
fleet before the Great War, the entire interwar period saw one defence cut back
after another. All parties acquiesced, but Meaher points particularly to the
Australian Labor Party, which did everything possible to reduce defence
spending between the wars, and then embraced the excuse that Australia’s
problems must be somebody else’s fault the moment Australia was threatened.
Meaher comments:

The notions of betrayal that inform popular
thinking about Australia in the Second World War do nothing to assist our
understanding of the past or prepare for the future, based as they are on
overly simplistic interpretations.

About Me

A professional historian and educator challenges some assumptions.
(A sometimes tongue-in-cheek polemic, with a Socratic emphasis on challenging people to argue back. Please do so... I make some of it outrageous largely to encourage a debate).